Close Menu

SCRAWLINGS

The home for all those orphan ideas and thoughts and pieces of work that may or may not ever see the light of day. I'm sure you understand. And if you don't, have more ideas and thoughts, lose a few good ones, and then get back to me.

Do you remember the first time you were in school and they told you could be anything you wanted to be?

They’d say, “You can be an astronaut, a lawyer, or you can be the President of the United States of America. Because that’s what America is.”

I love that.

America was a kid that reached for the moon and landed there. America was a kid that wanted to be free and declared independence, wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. America was the original American dream. Before it was cool.

“What revealed itself to me was a very scary, very harsh truth.”

Michael Dove, Artistic Director of Forum Theatre asked me if I would be interested in doing some work in the upcoming Forum (re)acts series focused on the Syrian refugee crisis. The nature of the evening was about shedding light on an undeniably horrific situation where over 12 million of people are victims by inviting local artists from multiple disciplines to create artistic responses.

The evening brought a face to the crisis in ways I am sure people found deeply insightful, wonderfully creative, and absolutely appalling. What revealed itself to me was a very scary, very harsh truth.

What comes next might piss some folks off but there is only one person that I care not to offend by saying this and he is the subject of what I’m about to say.

It’s about 1:30am on a Sunday night… or Monday morning. It’s been a busy day. Household stuff in the AM, some video games to grease the mind-gears, followed by some “life maintenance” as I like to call it, tape a few auditions, upload, send, go play soccer on the National Mall with friends, head to the bar to learn some practical ASL with Dog & Pony (totally worth doing by the way), come home and find out I uploaded the wrong files, fix the fuck-up, have some tea, and poke around the internet a bit. For as much as that was a run-on sentence, it was a run-on kind of day. Minutes and hours blend together, tasks and commutes in total disagreement, but you keep going. Nothing terribly surprising about that.

You see, I’m still debating whether this is a thing worth doing, this blog thing. Writing in a vacuum seems very strange. But since I’ve decided to make this site dedicated to all my side-projects, my little orphan ideas as I call them, I can’t very well just give them shelter and leave them to fend for themselves. That’d be inhumane.

Though the question of subject matter does strike me as quite the obstacle. Especially with a format like a blog, or as I like to think about it, a series of articles about certain things. I’m not what one would call a supporter of the weepy-woe-is-me-now-look-at-my-food-and-read-about-my-life thing so I’m going to do my best to give that a wide berth and leave those people to their audience. It’s not my cuppa. Maybe that’s why you’re here instead of there… for now anyway. To spend any more time thinking on it does seem totally irrelevant, and utterly on the nose or apropos considering the nature of this string of thoughts. Perhaps we have something in common, or not all for that matter. It’s all the same.

I’ve decided to get off my duff and do something about this. So this is me starting. It’s not much now, but hopefully, I’ll keep at it and not let it fall completely by the way-side. Not being cynical, just realistic, and forcing myself into being slightly more accountable. Anyway, this is a temp post which will not stay here long anyway. Or it might. You never know.